"It actually freaks you out when people do such things to you ... eye-teasing, passing lewd comments and stalking you. They literally rape you with their eyes," she said.

Now, she keeps pepper spray and has enrolled in self-defense taekwondo programs.

Prakash and her friends hold each others' hands while walking and text license plate numbers and their location to their parents and others when they travel in a cab or a slow-moving auto-rickshaw.

As young girls, elders, too, faced similar attitudes, which they say only worsened as the city and the country grew.

"I can speak about my own experience, as a student, in this city -- people are pinching you, touching you, someone is coming close to you. This is absolutely the mentality where you look at a woman as an object of sex and (which) you use and abuse," rights activist Ranjana Kumari said.

As furor about Sunday's assault rose, some Indian lawmakers even called for treating rape as a capital crime.

The country's human rights body shot off notices to city police and federal authorities, demanding an explanation of the latest sexual assault.

"The incident has raised the issue of declining public confidence in the law and order machinery in the city, especially in its capacity to ensure safety of women, as a number of such incidents have been reported in the national capital in the recent past," the National Human Rights Commission said in a statement Tuesday.

Five people, including the bus driver and a minor, have been arrested in connection with Sunday's rape, New Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said.

Meantime, some observers say anti-women acts in India stem from the country's largely patriarchal social setup.

Indians' preference for sons over daughters, for example, has manifested itself in a worrisome population imbalance. The 2011 census of the world's second-most populous nation recorded an alarming drop in the percentage of girls among country's preschoolers.

For every 1,000 boys up to 6 years old, the census counted 914 girls, a drop from 927 a decade ago.

It's illegal in India to abort a child because of its sex, but such abortions happen, often aided by illegal clinics.

"The reasons for the high number of female feticide in India include a deep-rooted traditional son preference, continued practice of dowry and concern for safety of the girl child and exploitation and abuse of women and girl children," Krishna Tirath, India's women and child development minister, acknowledged in parliament in March 2011.

"More law will only serve to give a sense of something being done, when in fact very little is being done. To confront the hatred that is now manifesting itself in the most egregious ways is to move forward as a society," Ratna Kapur, a professor at Jindal Global Law School, wrote in The Hindu newspaper Wednesday.

"We need to think about how we can handle women's equality in ways that are not perceived as threatening. That demands greater responsibility on the part of parents as well as society not to raise sons in a way in which they are indoctrinated with a sense of superiority and privilege. There is also a need on the part of young men to be actively involved in their schools and communities in advocating women's equality rights," she added in her opinion column, headlined "Rape and the crisis of Indian masculinity."